Circle – 24 LEDs on a 10cm diameter circle

In order to use the RasPiO Inspiring Products you need the RasPiO Inspiring Driver! Available here. Or choose the bundle in the dropdown.

Der Treiber muss selber zusammengelötet werden!

RasPiO Inspiring is a system of programmable RGB LED boards which can connect together to make whatever 2D or 3D shape you want. Make a…

Light Pyramid

Mood light

Turn-signal/light system for your bicycle

Internet Clock (NTP)

TV simulator security device

Persistance of vision project

Natural light alarm clock

Controllable light source for macro photography/videography

Christmas or other holiday decorative lighting

Eye-catching wearable

Or embed them in any project that requires really fine control over colour and intensity of light.

Controllable by Virtually any Platform

RasPiO Inspiring can be controlled by most popular electronics platforms, including…

Raspberry Piand Python (or any other language)

Arduino

ESP8266(e.g. Wemos D1 mini)

ATtiny(e.g. Digispark)

You could even control it from your phone, if connected to wifi-enabled device like the Pi Zero W. Open a port on your router and you could switch on your ‘TV simulator’ if you’re away from home (make it look like someone’s home watching TV).

But you can also hook up all sorts of other control mechanisms too, such as light, motion, sound or temperature sensors to trigger your LEDs.

Technical Stuff

For other platforms, there’s a fantastic library called FastLED which can be used with Arduino and ESP8266 devices.

Power Requirements

Each colour of each LED is rated at 20 mA, so a pyramid’s 72 LEDs could draw as much as 4.3A at full tilt. In practice you never really use maximum brightness on all three colours at once.

For most applications you can take power from the Pi, if your PSU has enough juice. But, if you need to, you can connect an external 5V source and use the alternative connections on the driver board (or add supplementary wires directly to 5V/GND on the LED boards).